Since 1987, Methow Arts Alliance has worked with the community to produce a unique arts festival at Twisp River Park. Held on the 4th of July annually, this community event features day-long entertainment, over 12 hands-on-art booths (hosted by a professional artists from the Artist in Residence roster for the Okanogan region) for children and adults, a local food zone, a pie eating contest, artist demonstrations, field games and much more!

FLIGHT! Festival-goers get to experience this year’s theme of flight with ninja bird costumes, nests, birds, airplanes and more. The theme links participants with opportunities to create, fly and imagine.

Held in the Twisp River Park and starting just after the Independence Day Parade through Twisp, the festival offers something for everyone. The core activities are over a dozen art booths offering a variety of arts experiences for all ages.

This year brings NANDA and new additions of a BEER GARDEN, ART CLASSES for teens and adults and LOCAL ART VENDORS as well as performance artists sprinkled throughout the park.

Headlining the event is NANDA: Acrobaticalist Ninja Theatre

Characterized by a calculated chaos of comedy, high-energy kung-faux fighting, and irreverent pop-culture parodies, NANDA has been performing since 2004. Also incorporating dance, juggling, and acrobatics, NANDA performances are a mishmash of classic vaudeville, circus and modern live entertainment innovation.

Led by teaching artists and community volunteers, the art booths will include annual favorites such as Laverty Construction’s Wooden Boats, Barry Stromberger’s copper arts, tie-dyed t-shirts, and face-painting, as well as new booths for celebrating flight in all forms.

Demonstration booths will feature painters, glass artists, massage therapists, needle felting and firefighters. Again this year will be an opportunity to hand-paint ceramic bowls for Room One’s 7th Annual Soup Dinner, which raises funds to preserve this vital community resource. And the increasingly popular pie-eating contest will move to center stage so the rest of us can watch the hilarious battle of mouth, stomach, and will.

The increasingly popular pie-eating contest will move to center stage so the rest of us can watch the hilarious battle of mouth, stomach, and will.

The whole park becomes takes flight during the festival: day-long stage music and song is intriguing; and live music keeps the scene dynamic, as well as providing a vibrant backdrop for the many celebrations of art happening around the entire park.

PERFORMANCE

NANDA: Acrobaticalist Ninja Theatre.

Characterized by a calculated chaos of comedy, high-energy kung-faux fighting, and irreverent pop-culture parodies, NANDA has been performing since 2004. Also incorporating dance, juggling, and acrobatics, NANDA performances are a mishmash of classic vaudeville, circus and modern live entertainment innovation.

The four members of NANDA grew up together in Port Townsend, WA, where they developed a vision of limitless creative expression from early childhood. Nurtured by the supportive environment cultivated in their hometown, this vision was able to grow and has become an ideal for an entirely new and unique display of performance art. Coining the term “acrobaticalism” to describe this process, and using its tenets as a window to the world, NANDA invents material that draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, harping on everything from cinema and pop-culture icons to rock music and even cartoons.

This explode-out-of-the-box mentality has inspired extensive explorations into a variety of other avenues, including live video projection, animation and sound. Nearly every second of the action being performed onstage is accompanied by a tightly integrated cinematic sound track. The effect produced is that of a visceral audio/visual blast, and this rich sensory experience, along with the impressive degree of physicality used to convey the action, make NANDA performances accessible and highly entertaining to audiences of virtually any age or background, and of any language or nationality.

Olivia De La Cruz and Isaac Castillo along with Wild Mountain Nation will play original music to round out the day!